Civilian schools vs military schools.

Bottom Line: Faculty Dilution

In the US there is no equivalent of Kings college in London. The issue you run into, is that with such a large collegiate eductaion base, where do the experts come from. The military run schools are the best manner to collect the best talent available for the faculty. Evne with the umpteen different DoD run schools out there, there are issues with dillution of the talent base as far as faculty availability. Often the civlian faculty experts are on loan, fellowships or visiting faculty. This enables some experts to bwe available to both demographics. In the US this problem is manifested in higher eductaion in various academic programs and how many quality instructors you can get. I am a historian by training, and I know where the stronger military history programs are. However, that does not mean that for certain niches there are better programs. For example, when I was at West Point, Duke and Ohio State were the two big general purpose miliatry history graduate programs that the military history guys went to, with Texas A&M coming on strong late in my time at USMA. However, the Napoleonic guys were starting to come out of Florida State because there was some expertise at that school in that area. Texas Tech made a decison to have the Viet Nam studies program, and many faculty were coming from there. Universities will look for a niche that is not filled, and usually attempt to develop something that will fill it if they see the long term financial viability of the program. That is just in history, the fine arts have the same problem, so my question is where do you go? The current fellowship program that military offers is a good program for senior level officers to either go to the war college, or go to certain civillian institutuions and get war college credit. As the son of an academic and an educator, I think the system the US militayr has isn't bad, now whetehr or not people utilize it is another question, and it is one based on individual choices not systemic ones.